Browsing by Subject "Perception (Philosophy)"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Defense of Nonconceptual Contents
    (2012) Wingfield, Elizabeth; Franco, Paul; Macbeth, Danielle
    The debate over whether perceptual experience includes nonconceptual contents is not only an interesting problem in itself, but has important bearings on other questions in philosophy, especially epistemology and philosophy of mind. The contemporary debate has two sides. On one side, philosophers such as John McDowell think that all perception is necessarily conceptual. On the other side, philosophers such as Christopher Peacocke think that not only are there nonconceptual contents in our perceptions but that these contents ground our knowledge claims. In this paper I first outline the arguments and the motivations McDowell and Peacocke advance in favor of their views. I then argue that both sides, to one extent or another, get it right. I argue that McDowell is correct to insist that nonconceptual contents do not play a role in knowledge but that Peacocke is nonetheless correct in stating that nonconceptual contents are a part of our perceptual lives. I argue that while nonconceptual contents are a rich part of our sensory awareness, it would be untenable to state that they play a role in our knowledge acquisition. In the concluding section I explain why a robust characterization of the nonconceptual contents I defend is in principle an impossible task.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Transcendental Exposition of the Intentionality of Perception
    (1992) Lahiri, Smita; Kosman, Louis Aryeh; Dostal, Robert J.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Having a Taste for What’s There
    (2011) Keough, Sydney; Yurdin, Joel; Macbeth, Danielle
    A great deal of philosophical anxiety has fixated on the notorious fact that the world does not always match our experience of it. Conversely, little attention has been paid to the equally interesting and similarly difficult phenomenon of expert perception—the ability to train one’s perceptual sensitivity. In this essay, I analyze the perceptual expertise of tea-tasters and argue that their privileged gustatory standing reveals episodes of perception to be the potentially skilled exercises of a power to take in how things are with the sensible world. This view of expert perception poses an explanatory challenge for both internalist and externalist pictures of mentality—the two of which grow up out of a concern with preserving our perceptual access to the world while simultaneously accounting for the fallibility of this access. This gestures at the possibility that a satisfying account of expert perception requires explanatory work to be done by both the ‘internal’ development of our perceptual mental states and by the world figuring as a constituent of those states. I contend that, should naïve realism adopt the notion that perceptual experience is conceptually articulated, it will be furnished with the resources necessary to answer expert perception’s challenge to externalism.